s about the freedom of the will would have had no
existence, if this pithy paragraph had been well pondered by those who
oppose the doctrine of necessity. For they rest upon the absurd
presumption that the proposition, "I can do as I like," is contradictory
to the doctrine of necessity. The answer is; nobody doubts that, at any
rate within certain limits, you can do as you like. But what determines
your likings and dislikings? Did you make your own constitution? Is it
your contrivance that one thing is pleasant and another is painful? And
even if it were, why did you prefer to make it after the one fashion
rather than the other? The passionate assertion of the consciousness of
their freedom, which is the favourite refuge of the opponents of the
doctrine of necessity, is mere futility, for nobody denies it. What they
really have to do, if they would upset the necessarian argument, is to
prove that they are free to associate any emotion whatever with any idea
whatever; to like pain as much as pleasure; vice as much as virtue; in
short, to prove, that, whatever may be the fixity of order of the
universe of things, that of thought is given over to chance.

In the second part of this remarkable essay, Hume considers the real, or
supposed, immoral consequences of the doctrine of necessity, premising
the weighty observation that

"When any opinion leads to absurdity, it is certainly false; but it
is not certain that an opinion is false because it is of dangerous
consequence."--(IV. p. 112.)

And, therefore, that the attempt to refute an opinion by a picture of
its dangerous consequences to religion and morality, is as illogical as
it is reprehensible.

It is said, in the first place, that necessity destroys responsibility;
that, as it is usually put, we have no right to praise or blame actions
that cannot be helped. Hume's reply amounts to this, that the very idea
of responsibility implies the belief in the necessary connexion of
certain actions with certain states of the mind. A person is held
responsible only for those acts which are preceded by a certain
intention; and, as we cannot see, or hear, or feel, an intention, we can
only reason out its existence on the principle that like effects have
like causes.

If a man is found by the police busy with "jemmy" and dark lantern at a
jeweller's shop door over night, the magistrate before whom he is
brought the next morning, reasons from those effects to their